ISNJH wrote:I tried to make an account for the first time on this forum a few weeks back .... I thought maybe to it had not gone through so I went to try and make my account again and it said my email address had been banned :/

Hello ISNJH. Welcome to our little corner of the internet.
Sorry to hear that you had trouble signing-up for the forums.
Please understand that we have had a lot of trouble with SPAMMING on the forum over the past couple of years. In response, GHQ has taken several measures, including a fairly involved sign-up proceedure and a set of volunteer MODERATORS (including yours truly), who have the primary responsibility of patrolling the threads for SPAM.
It may well be that you did not complete the sign-on proceedures correctly the first time you tried to sign up. You can be rejected if you do not answer the questions, if you answer the questions without mentioning any interest in wargaming or miniatures (or scale modelling or trains), or if you listed a commercial website in your profile.
Also, there are some server IP addresses that are specifically banned. These occured when many SPAMs were observed coming from particular servers which had no legitimate forum participants. It is possible that you are the first legitimate user to route to this forum from a server that has been banned for routing too much SPAM.
So in desperation ... I setup a yahoo that is not my primary email so I could register on the forum again. I am not a spammer or trouble maker and I would like to be able to use my primary email account to get alerts to replies to my topics or posts. Can I please have my email address unbanned so I can get alerts at my main email??
The step you've taken was a reasonable compromise. This forum generates relatively little outbound email, so using an alternative addy for this purpose should work well enough for now.
If you want to ensure you receive alerts on new products and/or website specials, I suggest you sign up for the free e-mail list. This is a seperate function from your forum registration, and
should work even with an email address that does not work for the forum.
These suggestions are just that ... suggestions. I am only a volunteer here on the forum, and do not work for nor represent GHQ management. But if you follow these steps you'll get most of what you want, even if it is all a bit more complicated than you might prefer.
I would also suggest that you use the "Contact GHQ" function of the forum, and give your request for un-banning directly to GHQ customer service. The GHQ folks are a very helpful and responsive. I expect they'll figure out a way to simplify it all for you.
Hope that helps.
-Mark 1
(A friendly neighborhood FORUM MODERATOR)